What I love about Celia Laskey‘s short story “One Person Away,” is the universality of the conflict; these are people we know and situations and malls and buses we’ve ridden on. And while the identities are specific, the striving for acceptance or renewal seems palpable:

I flip through my pictures of America and transformed teens: windmills silhouetted over sherbety skies, a girl with freckles and a brand-new nose ring sticking out her tongue, hay bales like gigantic cinnamon buns plopped haphazardly in freshly-cut fields, a boy in a hot-pink blazer with a mesh tank top underneath smiling shyly – from “One Person Away”

—and vivid: those spaces of heard-through speech we can’t get out of our heads or cameras. Plus, Laskey’s dialogue and mirror-asides aren’t too shabby either.